We have matched 24 of the 26 participants in the Engineering & Research Institute,
Beijing SEED pilot term that started officially this week. Two of the mentoring
partnerships were just confirmed this morning. We started the matching process on
18 May so this is going very quickly indeed. The two remaining participants are in
active conversations with potential mentors so I have good hope of their being matched
very soon. As of Wednesday, 10 of the pairs had already gone through their facilitated
partnership training and the others were in the scheduling process for training.
Over 70% of the matched Mentors so far this term are executives (Directors,
Distinguished Engineers, or Vice Presidents) which is slightly lower seniority than
SEED’s average but is good enough. The mentee participants are all working in Beijing
but the Mentors are all over: here in
the California Bay Area USA, Amersfoort Netherlands, New Jersey USA, Toronto Canada,
Colorado USA, Virginia USA, Beijing China, and Blackwater Camberley UK. The conversations
of this group are going to be impressively international.
There are 18 applications so far for the two world-wide 2005-2006 SEED terms which start
in September: 5 for the Recent Hires group and 13 for the Established Staff group.
Applications are due 17 June. Some of the applicants
have very distinguished backgrounds. They are from all over geographically, professionally,
and demographically. As usual, women and non-US staff are asking to take advantage of
the SEED program at a consistently higher rate than their representation in Engineering
overall. This has been the pattern since we started SEED in 2001.
I presented on the SEED program at the Grace Hopper Conference of Women in Computing
(Chicago IL USA, October 2004). It was interesting to learn about mentoring programs
at other high tech
companies. Sun does seem to be at the high metrics-driven institutionalized end of
the scale: most of the other programs discussed seemed less structured and did not
collect much data on success or satisfaction.
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